On Saturday, Mahela Jayawardene scored his 29th Test hundred to draw level with Donald Bradman. It was a spiteful pitch and runs were hard to come by. It was an innings in a losing cause against a team that no longer is the best going around. Yet, runs against Australia don’t come easy at the best of times. Ricky Ponting turned the ball square on this wicket and Mahela himself would have fancied his chances bowling spin on a wicket that had more turn in it than all the head-turns a pretty girl would manage in a lifetime. It was Mahela at his best – playing late, with soft hands and precise footwork and impeccable judgement.

The cricketers' best years are lived spending more time with team mates than with family. It is the moments after each victory, celebrating with team mates in the dressing room, that seduces cricketers to keep repeating them.

It is the reason why many cricketers choose to get involved in the game as administrators, commentators, or journalists after they retire, for it is the banter with colleagues and team mates they miss most.

Cricket, they say, mirrors life with its vicissitudes. It seduces sensitive men into it and throws them out of sport when still in their thirties.

This book, Out of the Box by Harsha Bhogle, is promoted as a collection of the best of Harsha Bhogle’s articles for Indian Express. It is more a selection of Harsha Bhogle’s works for the Indian Express in the last 5 years. I picked it up in a hope to read some of his earlier articles as he has often admitted to being influenced by Peter Roebuck and even tried to write like him in his early days. Though I had read many of the articles over the years, to have them all together in a single book is a treat – like Neville Cardus’ Cardus On Cricket and Peter Roebuck’s It Takes All Sorts.

I often wondered as to how he manages to shuffle between radio, television and print media so effortlessly. I even concluded sometime back that if you were good in one medium, you would be good in the other mediums as well. Through personal experience I have learned over the years that you should be able to say what you have to say in 20 words in 15 seconds on a television programme which you would describe over 500 words in the next day column space. Through some of his works I have been able to acknowledge that different mediums require different skills.

There are some peculiar cricket names that are generally mispronounced. Mostly, they happen to be those from the Indian sub-continent. Let’s take a small tour on these cricketing names from around the world.

Premier Leagues galore everywhere whether it is Premier League of USACA (United States of America Cricket Association) or of KSCA (Karnataka State Cricket Association), they are sprouting from every where so much so that it has become the scourge of modern day cricket.